Success stories are seductive because they are much easier to obtain than stories about social business failures. Vendors serve up success stories on a silver platter, whenever they can convince a customer to serve as a reference.

I believe the success stories of enterprise social networking are out
there, but it's also clear that they aren't as common or as easy to
achieve as you might expect. As part of my research for a Jan. 5 BYTE
webcast I'll be participating in (The Rise of Social Networks in the Enterprise), I've turned my attention to the obstacles to success.

Some of the material below comes from a close reading of the social business predictions for 2012
from Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis
Group, and the articles he links to. One of his predictions is that
social intranets, or enterprise social networks, will continue to
struggle for adoption.

Social business is no longer a nice to have,but is now a business imperative to improvecustomer communication and engagement,build loyal partner networks and improveinternal collaboration. We have been blogging,tweeting, connecting and collaboratingonline for years, but now it’s not just forpersonal use. The growth in social businesscan be measured by the amount being spenton software solutions purchased to help enterprisesmeet their social business strategies.According to Gartner, spending onsocial software to support sales, marketing,product development and customer servicewill exceed $1 billion worldwide in 2013Here is the URL for this bookmark: www.acquia.com/sites/default/files/library/attachment/Acquia[evalSBS-article]_FINAL.pdf Social business is no longer a nice to have,but is now a business imperative to improvecustomer communication and engagement,build loyal partner networks and improveinternal collaboration. We have been blogging,tweeting, connecting and collaboratingonline for years, but now it’s not just forpersonal use. The growth in social businesscan be measured by the amount being spenton software solutions purchased to help enterprisesmeet their social business strategies.According to Gartner, spending onsocial software to support sales, marketing,product development and customer servicewill exceed $1 billion worldwide in 2013

In addition Kudos Badges is an extensible platform that can leverage
game theory to provide performance management mechanics and reward
systems for applications outside of IBM Connections such as HR, Sales
Force Management, Help Desks, and many more.

In addition Kudos Badges is an extensible platform that can leverage
game theory to provide performance management mechanics and reward
systems for applications outside of IBM Connections such as HR, Sales
Force Management, Help Desks, and many more.

A social business isn't just a company that has a Facebook page and a
Twitter handle. A social business is one that embraces and cultivates a
spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both
internally and externally.

IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a social business:

Engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.

Transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.

Nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities.

IBM Lotus® Domino® 8.5.3 and IBM Lotus Notes® 8.5.3 have been optimized to reduce
the transactions from the client to the server. These optimizations yield a reduction in server
resources, thus lowering the Total Cost of Ownership. This white paper shows the reductions in
processor and disk utilization achieved with large numbers of Notes 8.5.3 clients running on a
single Domino 8.5.3 server.Here is the URL for this bookmark: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/documentation/nd853performance/

Welcome
to the IBM® Collaboration QuickStart for Social Business on the IBM
SmartCloud Enterprise - your instant access to three leading products in
social software - IBM Lotus Domino, IBM Sametime, and IBM Connections.
Designed for ease of use and minimal administration, this IBM SmartCloud
image is preinstalled with 85 user profiles, including names, email
addresses, images, and more. The goal is to get you up and running
quickly without any installations, hardware, or maintenance. All you
need is access to the system and a little time to start seeing the
benefits of a truly social business.
Here is the URL for this bookmark: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/appdevwiki.nsf/xpViewCategories.xsp?lookupName=IBM%20Collaboration%20QuickStart%20for%20Social%20Business

Enterprise social software is usually described as “Facebook for the
workplace.” But the description doesn’t quite convey how these
programs, have as the end result not socializing, but getting work
done.

True, just like with civilian Facebook, people write biographies of
themselves, post occasional pictures, share brief updates about their
accomplishments and “follow” others in the company they are interested
in.

But there is a business goal here: to use software to create the
feeling of everyone working together in the same conference room. My
favorite description of enterprise social software came from a customer
who said, “When we started our company, the guys working on the next
product release sat next to me. But as we got bigger, they moved to
another floor, then to another building, and finally to another
continent. Enterprise social software helps us feel small again.”